Charity Registers and corporate data: the missing link

A little-known fact about OpenCorporates is that not only is it the largest open database of companies in the world, it’s also probably the large database on nonprofits and charities in the world too. That’s not because we’ve made a big effort to fetch nonprofit and charity data, but because many nonprofits and charities are incorporated entities, listed on company registers. We’ve been making this fact clearer over the past year or so, by having a global nonprofit flag on companies, which is set based on company type.

Now, we’ve gone a step further, and have started importing charity and nonprofit registers, and matching this data to the data on the company register. The first was the Charity Register for England & Wales, and we’d had some experience of this via OpenCharities.org. The next was the Charity Register for Scotland, which was added last month. Now we’ve also added the Charity Register for Guernsey, and also for Oregon too.

By connecting this data together, you can start to get a much richer picture of the charity world. For example, here’s a query that shows US nonprofit companies with charity registrations (most for the Oregon register), Amazing how many of them are incorporated in DC.

Of course, this is just the start, and if you’d like to help us by writing a bot to import the charity or nonprofit register in your area, please let us know by joining us in our Slack Community or email us at community@opencorporates.com.